Upside down gains fans as way to grow

If pests and blight are wrecking your plants, it might be time to turn your garden on its head.

If pests and blight are wrecking your plants, it might be time to turn your garden on its head.

Growing crops that dangle upside down from homemade or commercially available planters is growing more popular, and its adherents swear they'll never come back down to earth.

"I'm totally converted," said Mark McAlpine of Guelph, Ontario, who began growing tomatoes upside down two years ago because cutworms were ravaging the ones he planted in the ground.

He made six planters out of 5-gallon plastic buckets. He cut a 2-inch hole in the bottom of each bucket and threaded a tomato seedling down through the opening, packing strips of newspaper around the root ball to keep it in place.

He then filled the buckets with soil mixed with compost and hung them on sturdy steel hooks bolted to the railing of his backyard deck.

"Last summer was really hot, so it wasn't the best crop, but I still was able to jar enough whole tomatoes, half tomatoes, salsa and tomato sauce to last me through the winter," said McAlpine, who plans an additional six upside-down planters this year.

Upside-down gardening, primarily of leggy crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, is more common partly because of the ubiquity of Topsy Turvy planters, available at retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens and Bed Bath & Beyond.

According to the company that licenses the planter, Allstar Products Group in Hawthorne, N.Y., sales this year are twice last year's, with 20 million sold since the device was invented in 2005.

Not to be outdone, Gardener's Supply and Plow & Hearth recently began selling rival upside-down planters.

The advantages of upside-down gardening are many: It saves space; there is no need for stakes or cages; it foils pests and fungus; there are less, if any, weeds; there is efficient delivery of water and nutrients thanks to gravity; and it allows for greater air circulation and sunlight exposure.

Although there are skeptics, proponents say the proof is in the produce.

Tomato and jalapeno seedlings sprout from upside-down planters fashioned out of milk jugs and soda bottles that hang from the fence surrounding the Redmond, Wash., yard of Shawn Verrall, a Microsoft software tester who blogs about gardening at www. cheapvegetablegardener. com.

Verrall turned to upside-down gardening last summer as an experiment.

"I put one tomato plant in the ground and one upside down, and the one in the ground died," he said.

The other tomato did so well, he planted a jalapeno upside down, too, and it was more prolific than the one he had in the ground.

"The plants seem to stay healthier upside down if you water them enough, and it's a great way to go if you have limited space," he said.

Although horticulturists and plant scientists agree that pests and blight are less likely to damage crops suspended in the air, they said they're unsure whether growing them upside down rather than right-side up will yield better results.

"Growing things upside down seems like a fad to me, but I'm glad people are fooling around with it and hope they will let us traditionalist gardening snobs know what we've been missing," said Hans Christian Wien, a horticulture professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Judging from gardening blogs and websites, those fooling around with upside-down gardening are generally enthusiastic, particularly if they have planted smaller varieties of tomatoes.

"Bigger tomatoes are too heavy and put too much stress on the vine, causing it to twist and break," said Michael Nolan, an avid gardener in Atlanta and a writer for Urbangardencasual.com.

Tomato varieties are labeled as either indeterminate or determinate, and horticulture experts recommend choosing indeterminate ones for upside-down gardens.

Determinate tomato plants are stubbier, with somewhat rigid stalks that issue all their fruit at once, which could weigh down and break the stems if hanging upside down.

Indeterminate types have more flexible, sprawling stems that produce fruit throughout the season and are less likely to be harmed by gravity.

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